Episode Report Card Daniel: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Occupy Terra Nova
By Daniel | Season 1 | Episode 12 | Aired on 12.19.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The future is coming, the future is coming! Taylor gathers up the troops and stations a team next to the portal to watch for the incoming colonists/army from Hope Plaza. The 11th pilgrimage starts to arrive without much excitement, but when Josh's stupid girlfriend comes through, Jim runs over to hug her. Conveniently the next guy through is an unwilling suicide bomber and (unlike Brody on Homeland) his trigger mechanism works because it is apparently on a timer.
So the portal blows up, and all hell breaks loose as the army from 2149 is now untethered to a certain spot, and luckily arrive right near Terra Nova. But we get to see none of this battle because the show is too cheap to show us any kind of potentially awesome fight sequence. Instead we jump ahead three days and Jim's got a massive case of tinnitus and starts walking around the occupied camp. Seems that while Josh's dumb girlfriend was killed in the blast, Taylor and his men escaped scot-free and are now holing up in the jungle somewhere. Wash tried to hold off the future army from overtaking Terra Nova, but after too many civilian casualties, she caved and is now drinking her troubles away at the bar.
Malcolm is slowly working on the device that allows the future army dudes to go back to 2149 that some dinosaur (that we also didn't get to see!) took down in the melee. In the meantime, Jim plays deaf and sneaks out of camp to help Taylor (who sent his location secretly via a marked bullet). The two happily stop all of the planned sonic explosions that are going to be used to clear-cut the jungle so the invaders can strip mine the land and take the ore back to 2149 for fun and profit.
There's some terrible acting from Jim and Elizabeth as they ponder their fates while having sex, followed by some remarkably annoying stuff between Skye and Lucas, wherein he decides that they are siblings. This naturally leads to Lucas grossly hitting on his new sister and Josh deciding to get in the middle of it. Josh gets beaten to a pulp for his troubles and Jim steps in, so that they both get tossed in jail.
Lucas reluctantly lets Josh go, but keeps Jim around to torture with a taser... until Elizabeth gets an idea to torture the hypochondriac second in command from the future until he cooperates in getting Jim free. Then the entire Shannon family escapes from Terra Nova, with the help of Wash, who gets herself shot in the head for her troubles. I would have liked to have seen that situation entirely reversed, as Wash is far more interesting of a character than the entire Shannon family, but no one writing this show cares about my feelings. Obviously.
Mira doesn't give a hell about the Shannons escaping, so long as she can still get back to the future to see her daughter when Malcolm finishes his device. And though it seemed that Taylor was successful in stopping the explosions, the army of the future seems to have successfully amassed some substantial amount ore to take back.
After Jim wanders aimlessly for a while and stumbles across Maddie and her boyfriend in a heated make-out session in the woods, he remembers that Wash had a message for Taylor. Once he finally gets around to telling Taylor, it reminds the man of an impossible battle that he and Wash once fought where they cut themselves off from the world by blowing up a bridge so that more enemy troops couldn't come in. So they decide to blow up Hope Plaza, and cut off any connection to the future and additional supplies and colonists, in order to keep the money grubbing enemy at bay.
To do this, they have to sneak Jim and a giant dinosaur onto an ore mining ship and sent him through the portal with the other resources going back to the future. Skye helps, and they replace a large truck that held some mystery item from the Badlands with the truck that has Jim on board.
Jim and the dino succeed in taking down Hope Plaza and effectively cut off their connection the future, but not before Jim (and not the dino) gets back through the portal. While Jim is off in 2149, Taylor is having a heart-to-heart with Lucas about some outstanding mommy issues, and Lucas ends up stabbing Taylor. Even though Skye sees this and shoots Lucas a whole bunch of times, he still manages to escape.
But no time to deal with that lost sheep as Taylor has to take his people back to Terra Nova. Seems the remaining future army men and the Sixers have packed up and moved north to the Badlands (with a pissed off Mira in tow, presumably). Seems that the mystery item (which Taylor has in his possession after the old swaperoo) is the prow of a ship from the 1800s, because this show thinks (incorrectly) that it is Lost. What else may be in the Badlands? The world may never know, because god willing this show won't come back for a Season 2. I'm just going to pretend in my mind that one of the meteors -- from the shower that the Shannon family cloyingly gathered around to watch -- hit Earth and wiped out all human wife.
There is so much more of the Skye/Lucas drama and the Taylor/Lucas drama that I barely even touched on here, but Lucas is such a remarkably hammy actor that it was hard to take him seriously. Bulging your eyes out to express shock is not acting, FYI. It made any tension from this episode even sillier than it should have been, and pair that with remarkably few moments of actual battle (sans the dino attack on Hope Plaza) and these two hours were pretty tedious to watch. -- Angel Cohn
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We swoop in over the dystopian landscape of the present-day Earth. (I mean, the present in this show, so really the future. You know what I mean.) It's all brown and dusty and domed, and Lucas is in one of those domes watching as mining equipment and soldiers get squared away for the eleventh pilgrimage. He chats with some nefarious type who we haven't seen before, and they ask about the jagged scar on his neck. Lucas brushes it off as an encounter with a nykoraptor that almost left his boss a poorer man. The boss is all, "Let's not count our money just yet," and Lucas says they have the best army money can buy. You can't buy character, Lucas.
Transition over to prehistoric Terra Nova, where Taylor and Jim are arranging their soldiers around the portal, since they're not sure what's going to be coming through. Elisabeth's there too, setting up med tents, which will provide CO2 infusers to pilgrims or serve as a mobile trauma unit if they wind up with casualties. Jim has to show his much-more-professional-than-he-is wife who the boss is by telling her to be ready to fall back to the colony if things "go sideways" and I think she's there precisely IN CASE things go sideways.
Dunham sets up some big gun facing the portal, and Taylor reminds him that people can only come through a couple at a time, so they might as well use the choke point to their advantage. Dunham wants to know why they don't just shut the portal down, and fortunately Malcolm's there to explain that the portal only focuses the time fracture -- if they shut it down, it will only open again some random place within about three klicks. Sadly, the fact that they provide this information serves as an alert that one way or another, that's what's going to happen.
Anyway, the pilgrimage is scheduled for tomorrow, so there's plenty of time for everyone to get their affairs in order. Finish watching Friday Night Lights, play a few last rounds of Team Fortress 2, that sort of thing.
Back at the Shannon household that night, Maddy has decided that she's an expert on military strategy, since her stupid boyfriend Mark gave her a book on it, and Zoe's hoping to shoot a sonic cannon if there's a war. Josh wants to come to the portal in case Kara's there, I guess because he's really tired of jacking it, but Jim wants him there to look after his sisters. He promises to take care of Kara if she comes through.
The next day, Maddy kisses her stupid boyfriend Mark goodbye, and sighs as he turns to wake away, so he turns back and rams his tongue back down her throat and tells her he loves her and she says it right back to him. Meanwhile, Taylor and Washington are being just as intimate in their own militaristic way, and Jim tells his kids to hide if there are any problems, even though his stupid kids are basically lucky to be alive by this point considering all the stupid things they've done.